Thanks Paola for your perspective on the goal of the conversation.
Understanding that you had a different scope makes your comments make more
sense to me.  Since the original message pointed us to the PR, I still feel
that the current message to go into the curriculum is the top priority.

A problem I am aware of is that because these things move so fast, most
accessible, nontechnical material that people rely on is corporate
marketing materials, which present a very skewed view.
My examples come from:

   -  (mostly) scholarly literature in communities like CHI (top venue in
   human computer interaction) and FAccT (a top, albeit new, venue on
   fairness, Accountability and transparency in computing) among others and my
   department's recent talks by CS PhD candidates and post docs during a round
   of hiring
   - (less) from my second hand experience of seeing undergraduate computer
   science students' learning undermined by them using LLMs when they are
   novices and then they are completely unable to learn material in later
   courses. Even in supervising research students, students' reliance on LLMs
   has made my work of code review much more exhausting because LLMs code
   style is not great in general and students on their own gave me code I was
   much happier with than what they get with LLM help.
   - (minimal) first hand experience using and (more) stress testing LLMs.
   I have almost compeltely stopped trying to use them for my own programming
   work because after a few tries they gave too much code of such low quality
   that they slowed me down, I can get my work done faster without the LLM in
   most cases. The exception is when I work in a language I do not know well,
   they provide the kind of starting point that I used to get from stack
   overflow a little faster than digging through sites like that.

I do not have a link to a specific recording, but Ruha Benjamin, at
princeton, has been giving a talk lately that groups both utopian and
dystopian views of an AI future as technodeterminism, assuming that the
future of how a technology impacts society is predetermined, and calls for
us to challenge that-- to center people and our collective agency to shape
the world we want to live in, rather than assuming that our future world
will be handed to us by tech firms. That is what is most important to me. I
think the Carpentries community is well positioned to empower people
to take this leap, but I am not sure what it looks like to get there.  I
hope we can keep having human-first conversations in this community.

*Sarah M Brown, PhD*
sarahmbrown.org
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
University of Rhode Island



On Sun, Mar 23, 2025 at 6:42 PM Paul Harrison via discuss <
[email protected]> wrote:

> On Wednesday, March 19, 2025, at 8:38 PM, Toby Hodges wrote:
>
> If we want to cover this, it needs to be in a separate lesson or as an
> almost total rewrite of existing materials IMO. Delving into this in detail
> would be too time consuming during a workshop otherwise, at the cost of all
> the other important things we want to teach people.
>
>
> Hi Toby. That sounds reasonable, I totally agree, what I was talking about
> is beyond the scope of updates to existing lesson material. I also agree
> with Sarah Brown's comments.
>
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